Mark Byron

Swiss Mrs.

Mark Kirkorian beat me to the headline, but it was too obvious to go unused; Michelle Bachmann and her family are now Swiss citizens as well as US citizens. Her husband is of Swiss descent and they took advantage of that "loophole." I'm not sure what advantages that might have, other than allowing use of a Swiss passport that would let you visit Cuba or other places that are on poor terms with Foggy Bottom.

Kirkorian, the Corner's resident immigration hawk, doesn't like it, and that's not an uncommon response. Politicians with dual citizenship are looked at askance for questionable loyalties.

A Canadian case is new NDP leader Thomas Mulcair's French co-citizenship via his French-born wife. He was in position to congratulate fellow lefty François Holland's win as a fellow Frenchman. Mulcair and former Liberal leader Stephane Dion have gotten flak for their literal French-Canadian legal status.

I doubt that Congresswoman Bachmann will have a bias towards cutting the Swiss slack on banking policy due to this new status. It almost seems like a flag of convenience, like companies setting up shop in Delaware for their loose corporate governance laws or ships flying Panama or Liberia's flag for their light regulation on shipping.

I'm the uncle of three dual-citizens; they're being raised here and will likely be as American as I am but likely a bit less American than the gung-ho nationalist Bachmann. I wouldn't be fearful of her becoming a pacifist, isolationist Swiss fifth column.

The Second Unforgivable Sin

Interesting move in California, where they are looking to regulate "reparative" de-gaying therapies, banning it for teens and giving warning disclaimers for adults wanting to give such therapy a shot-

The bill would prohibit so-called reparative therapy for minors and obligate adults seeking the treatment to sign a release form that states that the counseling is ineffectual and possibly dangerous.

This is an area that has hot-buttons on both sides. On one side, you have the psych community, who doesn't see homosexuality as something to be treated and thus discourages trying to; it does tend to put someone on a guilt trip if they can't shake same-sex urges and see them as sinful and problematic. Leading someone to despair and suicidal thoughts trying to change something that isn't seen as wrong is a bad thing. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" might be the mantra of the psychologist.

On top of that, you have the gay lobby that wants to stress the idea that they're "born this way" (as Ms Gaga puts it) and that such therapy is fruitless.

There's another side that would beg to differ, where they do see something wrong with it and do see worth in trying. Part of the problem on the "ineffectual" description is that you have a religious world view of the reparative therapists which is using spiritual tools that don't fit into a psychologist's paradigm and thus don't double-blind test well.

There's a overlap with the problems Teen Challenge has when dealing with secular drug rehab folks dissing their program; the evangelical and often-Pentecostal nature of TC seems to work well, but doesn't fit the classic mold because of the unorthodox nature of bringing the Holy Spirit to bear on the problem.

Combine that with the fact that the psychologists don't even accept that there is a problem to be solved in this case, and the RP folks are looked askance at, especially when you have the born-this-way lobby adding their two cents in.

Could trying make someone suicidal? I wouldn't be surprised. It is a tough nut to crack in many cases, and stories like Ray Boltz's point out that there are some folks that just don't take to such therapy.

However, there are some people it does help, and if your world-view and faith wants you to move away from same-sex attraction, it might be worth a shot. Some folks are bisexual with a same-sex bias, and those people have a better shot of responding that those that aren't switch-hitters.

The problem comes when you have people driven to despair by their inability to change as they run head-long into a church culture that has two unforgivable sins, grieving the Holy Spirit and same-sex attraction [insert Andy Stanley quip here]. People who would cut a drug addict or an addicted smoker or a fat person struggling to get his appetite under control some slack won't give the same grace for someone who struggles with same-sex attraction. That's where you get the suicides and other depression issues that the critics are concerned about, when the second unforgivable sin gets judged to the hilt.

The bill is unlikely to pass, for there are tons of First Amendment issues at play; it reminds me a bit of recent moves in CA to ban circumcision. In that case, the Jewish community had some sway with swing voters and those who sided with them on religious-liberty grounds. It would be interesting if some chits were cashed in from that battle on this one.

Looks Like We'll Need a Bigger Containtment Area

The much-ballyhooed North Carolina same-sex-marriage ban passed 61-39. If I'm not mistaken, such a bill has yet to be voted down anywhere, as all of the states that have same-sex marriage did it either by judicial decree or by legislative vote.

North Carolina did vote for Obama last year, as its urban and high-tech areas are bringing in more secular folks. That showed up in the voting patterns-

The amendment was trailing in Charlotte, in the Triangle counties around Raleigh and Chapel Hill, as well as the Winston-Salem-Greensboro area, according to figures from the State Board of Elections. But it was winning by wide margins in rural counties and in the suburbs of Charlotte -- the home of famous evangelist Billy Graham, who endorsed the ballot measure last week.

I recall when briefly looking at Raleigh as a possible relocation site that a wag noted that the Raleigh suburb of Cary was an acronym for Containment Area for Relocated Yankees. Looks like they had to expand the holding pen a bit.

Ford vs Schwinn?

Midland has been experimenting with bike routes and bike lanes as of late. It seems to echo a move back in the mid-70s to get people biking more. Back then, they at least had small bike lanes marked out on a number of roads where bikes would (in theory) have the right of way.

Emphasis on in theory. One of the problems of having bicycles in well-traveled areas is that cars going 25-45 MPH are interacting with 10-15 MPH bikes; that brings out the highway factoid that differences in speed is more of a problem than speed itself. The 21st century version of it has actual whole lanes dedicated to bikes on the three-lane one-way streets (Ashman and Rodd) going in and out of downtown from the northeast; that should minimize problems to some extent, as is routing bike routes through residential areas.

However, putting a lot of bikes on main drags creates problems, especially when bikes act like they are not subject to traffic laws, running lights and not paying attention to traffic. I've yet to see a bike get pulled over for bad driving. Even when bikes are playing by the rules, cars can treat them as pedestrians or worse, so the problems can run both ways.

Strangely, a BBC piece on Toronto's bike wars pulled my chatty ring. The BBC might have wandered into a minor skirmish between abrasive conservative mayor Rob Ford (think Chris Christie with about a third the charm) and Toronto's left. Previous Toronto governments have been more bike-friendly, and Ford is moving to be a bit more safety friendly and car friendly, which begs for a culture clash.

Not all bike-riders are liberals, but the activists generally are. Thus, the bile that has been flowing between Ford and the Hogtown left gets tacked on to this issue.

If you can build a bike expressway, like Midland has tried on the south side of town, turning the median of M-20 going out of downtown into an urban bike trail, you can be traffic-friendly and bike-friendly at the same time. If you don't have the free space to do that with and have cars and bikes coexisting on the same pavement, problems tend to crop up unless you're in a low-density subdivision setting, where working around a bike isn't a major issue.

One downside of bikes and cold-weather settings like Midland and Toronto is that they're not all that useful for about half the year. From about Halloween to early April, the weather is a bit too chilly to bike comfortably as temperatures go down towards freezing and below in the morning and you create your own 15MPH wind-chill. Even so, it's not a bad thing to encourage biking, but not at the cost of tying up traffic.

Food Network Meets Tru TV Meets ESPN?

Here's an interesting Detroit Free Press addition to the Delmon Young Jew-bashing story, discussing the millieu outside of the NY Hilton the Tigers were staying at-

The Hilton New York on 6th Avenue -- also known as the Avenue of the Americas -- is a favorite spot for professional sports teams. The Tigers are booked there for their weekend series. Only five blocks north of Times Square, the hotel is one of the city's largest. By day it bustles with tourists and the business activity of Midtown. By night it is home to dozens of sidewalk food vendors, many of them selling chicken kabobs and Halal food.

One vendor, who wanted to remain nameless, said that on most nights, say between 2:30-3 a.m., especially from Thursday to Saturday, drunken patrons spill from nearby bars and pubs and queue up at the trucks looking for something hot and spicy.

The food vendors set up on both sides of 6th Avenue at 52nd Street just across from the hotel entrance.

The food might be halal (I think that should be lower-case for the Muslim version of kosher), but Young was more haram in the wee hours of the morning.

[Update 4/28- The editors at the Free Press must of caught that, for a revised version goes with a lower-case halal.]

One thing that I have noticed in my late-night TV ramblings after a tutoring shift is that food trucks are a big item in bigger cities where they are allowed. New York has a long-standing tradition of street food (I'm reminded of the street hot dogs in Crocodlie Dundee as the analogue to the odd outback critters from their Aussie stay, she gives him the same retort he gave her-"tastes like [crap], but you can live on it.") which gets a late night twist in towns with an active night-life.

Getting people lubed up and on the street can be a recipe for disaster, and Young must have gone off his John Rocker.

Overcharge

I haven't seen anyone directly comment on the prospect that Florida officials may have gone a bit overboard with a 2nd-degree murder charge on Mr. Zimmerman. Here's the definition from the Florida code that will be a great aid to his defense team-italics added.

The unlawful killing of a human being, when perpetrated by any act imminently dangerous to another and evincing a depraved mind regardless of human life, although without any premeditated design to effect the death of any particular individual, is murder in the second degree...

That's going to be hard to prove. The fact that the guy was part of a neighborhood watch program points to something well short of the depraved psychopath the law is envisioning. To do that would require a major character assassination on the part of the prosecution, for it would only take one person our of twelve to say "whoa, isn't that a bit much for this scenario?"

If the prosecution is smart, they'll give the jury the option of a lower, manslaughter-type charge, which seems to better fit the case if self-defense isn't a good fit. However, that might not have been enough to keep the rhetorical lynch mob at bay who would want nothing short of a murder rap to be applied.

The Rodney King case comes to mind, where the first trial had the cops essentially up on attempted murder charges; when the jury was faced with the counter-argument that they were merely beating the crap out of King rather than trying to kill him, they took it and inadvertently set up some of the nastier rioting of my adult lifetime.

If a secondary charge isn't offered as an alternative, we're looking at a similar dynamic in the Treyvon case, where Zimmerman will be overcharged, acquitted and walking. That won't be pretty and will leave the White House of 2013 with the option of doing one of those "violate his civil rights" double-jeopardy end-runs to try him at the federal level as in the King case, assuming that the self-defense charge is weak enough to make a second trial hard to win for the feds.

Excellence in Burpcasting

I'm not with the conservative paradigm again; Breitbart's death did not leave me with the level of loss others did, nor do I want to go backing Rush for his latest foray into bad taste and poor political judgement. Advertisers are over-reacting, for a PG-13 Rush is nothing new; the Culture War button got pushed and good PC folks answered the call to abandon the good ship EIB.

Is there a double-standard? Not really.

If a liberal calls a conservative woman a slut, it is a generic insult, not a questioning of her sexual character; likewise, every guy who gets a anti-gay pejorative flung his way on a basketball court is set to be the next member of the Village People.

However, in this case, you had a woman who was in apparent need of birth control, which gets within hailing distance of earning the title, especially when Rush followed it up with a prurient request to watch her and her Obama-subsidized birth control in action. By that standard, Rush might get some fun watching my mom go through rehab with her Medicare-financed artificial knee; quite the party-starter, that one.

Also, you have a big talk-show host picking a fight with a previously-obscure liberal activist/law student, albeit one that became the poster girl for reproductive freedom for the left. Picking on Nancy Pelosi or another member of the congressional left would have been at Rush's weight class (pun not intended-he's trimmed down quite a bit since he got started).

Thus, Rush has a bit of a dressing-down coming. Not that it's the first time nor will it be the last. There are plenty of advertisers willing to pick up where the bailers left off and any station dropping Rush will see someone down the dial grab him up quickly. There's a market for what he does; all the left can do is make its minions steer clear.

One fringe benefit- any flak Rush is getting is stuff that isn't going the way of Rick Santorum or Republicans in general on the religious liberty-versus-contraception donnybrook. It took Super Tuesday off the front page long enough for Santorum to do well today.

Yes, liberal pundits get away with far more toxic rhetoric towards conservatives, but their clientelle is more used to R-rated language coming from their side and might feel prudish if they call them on it. That doesn't make two wrongs right.

A Pink Stink

If the Giants need an extra cornerback, they can check out the Komen folks, for they backpeddle very well to secular orthodoxy. I will leave it there for now, for I don't want to fire off ill-aimed salvos in the culture war.

Tickled Pink

It isn't often you get a general-purpose charity make a culturally-conservative stand, especially when it is a women-oriented one, but the news of the week is that the Komen breast cancer research folks stopped funding Planned Parenthood for breast cancer referrals; the link goes to a nice Megan McArdle piece on the issue.

Of course, the usual suspects on the left are up in arms, which brings forward the question of whether they are more pro-abortion or pro-liberal than they are pro-women. Everyone benefits from a reduction in breast cancer, while a thriving Planned Parenthood helps largely those on the left side of the ideological/theological spectrum; PP has some benign GYN activities, but abortion is its stock in trade.

So far, the new donors are outweighing the pulled donors. One would hope that would be the case.

The Disunited Way

I had seen reports a while back where the Kamen Foundation, the pink-ribbon breast cancer people, had contracted with Planned Parenthood to do some of the breast-cancer screening. Not to pay for any abortions, just for breast cancer screening. However, the association was enough to make Kamen persona non grata in certain quarters of the religious right.

In the news today was some fallout from that, where Lifeway, the Southern Baptist Convention owned publisher/bookstore chain, pulled some pink ribbon Bibles that had a $1 donation to Kamen as part of the package. They'll reuse the Bibles but ditch the promotional packaging. There's some good holy-hardware quip about blending the Word of God with cancer research fundraising, but that's another post.

The pink-ribbon brigade will of course castigate Lifeway-"the LifeWay move will hurt people who need breast cancer screenings", sayeth Darlene Jacobs. 

Yes, and the move of gay groups to boycott the Salvation Army over their orthodox view on sexuality will hurt the poor as well. The move of many United Ways to defund the Boy Scouts on similar grounds hurt boys as well.

Increasingly, communal efforts to do good will be shut down if the effort is seen to either be too conservative or too liberal in some way. Add that to the commercial boycotts, like Lowe's faux pas of this week, which merely gives oodles of publicity to an obscure show I hadn't even heard about prior to the ad-pull.

If there is no common society, there is no commonweal to defend and nourish. As we fragment into subcultures even within unhyphenated-American culture, those community institutions wind up becoming collateral damage in the disintegration.

 

Moroccan Mole

A Belgian of Moroccan descent shot up a marketplace in the Wallonian capital of Liege, killing at least three, with a fourth body found at the shooter's home. That puts things on the French-speaking side of Belgium. Since France has a colonial tie to Morocco (think of the French cop from Casablanca being shocked, shocked at the gambling), having alleged shooter Nordine Amrani in a French-speaking area makes some sense.

What is interesting in the BBC profile of Amrani (misspelling that into Armani might be fashionable), there seems to be no play on whether Islamic thought came into play at all. Amrani liked guns and pot and had a long rap sheet, but we don't know if he was just a European gun nut who happened to be Moroccan or whether he went jihadi on the town square. That might be a ghost worthy of a Get Religion piece.

No Ex Post Facto in the Court of Public Opinion

To borrow from John Calipari, there's nothing good that can happen at a nightclub at 1AM and a college board press conference at 10PM. JoePa got the ax last night; defensive coordinator Tom Bradley will take over for the rest of the year, including a key game against Nebraska Saturday. Instead of celebrating the matchup between the two newest members of the Big 10, we get the fallout of the worst scandal to hit a college football program in recent memory.

That being said, I'm not sure if firing Paterno for an error of omission nine years ago is the right path, especially when he announced he was stepping aside at the end of the year. If we rewind the tape to the summer of 2002, we knew a lot less about child sexual abuse than we do now.

We were just starting the big coverage of the Catholic priest sex abuse stories; that was one of the big stories that got a lot of Catholic writers to start blogs back in 2002 as the Blogosphere was in its infancy. In the near-decade that has followed we've learned that even decent-looking people can have an inner pervert and to err on the side of reporting stuff to authorities. That's 20/20 hindsight that Paterno didn't have at the time.

Paterno did report stuff, but not quite to the right authorities. The folks in the athletic department sat on the information and some of them are being charged for those misdeeds. When you couple that with the seemingly glowing reputation of Jerry Sandusky (from a distance, I knew him as the headmaster of Linebacker U, but his charitable work with kids made it seem even less likely to have him as a sex abuse suspect at the time), it's easy to see where Paterno might not have been bugging his bosses for feedback on the incident or sicking a county DA on the case.

One upside of firing him ASAP is that he won't have to deal with question for the last 4-5 games of the season; PSU has three regular seasons games left, plus a bowl game and probably a slot in the first Big Ten title game. Given l'affair Sandusky, we wouldn't get to see the Goodbye JoePa tour that would have normally have accompanied the announcement of his retirement; too many folks would be saying Goodbye and Good Riddance instead.

Good Riddance to one of the straightest shooters in the history of college football? It might be needed in a fire-the-whole-chain-of-command response to such scandals that is common these days, but Paterno deserved a better exit. A year or two from now, if he's still with us, Paterno should get the kind of elder statesman of the game spot that John Wooden held for a good quarter-century after stepping aside at UCLA.

Too Clean for Disney

Here's an interesting story of the new film The Mighty Macs; it covers the prime of a small Catholic college, Immaculata, which became national woman's basketball champs in the early 70s. In the pre-Title IX era, a lot of small schools became woman's basketball powers, (Delta State comes to mind as another example) since few places were taking it seriously.

This film has been on my radar for a while; since Eileen is a big Bones fan, she's been following it due to David Boreanaz planing the coach's husband. That creates an interesting symmetry, since his Bones co-star Emily Deschanel played coach Don Haskins' wife in Glory Road, covering the story of Haskins' all-black UTEP (ne Texas Western) starting five beating an all-white UK team in the 1966 title game.

The interesting thing is that the film comes in at G. Not PG, G. When's the last mainstream adult movie that came it at G, other than the Christian-crossover features flowing from the Facing the Giants/Courageous crew?

The movie was first shown in 2009 at Indianapolis's Heartland Film Festival but took some time to land a national distributor. Disney was interested but wanted to add a few mild swears to bump it from a G to a PG rating. Writer-director Tim Chambers said heck no, so had to find a different distributor.

That says a lot for the modern film industry, which Disney is part of. They missed out on having a lot of neat ESPN tie-ins in order to not look too prissy.

 

Purple Days

They're having an anti-gay-bullying "pride day" tomorrow, with purple being the color of support.

That puts me at loggerheads. How do you be anti-anti-gay without being pro-gay?

As someone who was on the wrong side of bullying as a kid, I sympathize with anyone who's being picked on. As a sensitive kid (and smart and the tallest kid in class, so a triple outlier), I got hit with those anti-homosexual pejoratives, but anyone who wasn't properly macho got those; we didn't have young people who were "out" back in the early-mid 70s, at least not where I lived.

Regardless of what someone is or does, they don't deserve to be picked on. The Golden Rule makes that loud and clear, so anyone making a gay teen's life miserable for no good reason is not on God's side.

As a Christian, I'm not a fan of Islam. It's a flawed religion that sees Jesus as merely a prophet rather than a subset of God. However, that doesn't mean I would go up to the pair of Muslim-looking girls at Midland High who leave about the time Eileen does when she subs there that need to chuck those veils or go back to Pakistan. They'd likely get far worse invective that I feel comfortable typing here, but such stuff is sinful, plain and simple.

As a Christian, I take what is written about homosexuality in the Bible at face value. That being said, that doesn't mean I have free rein to tease and be mean to a gay classmate. It's not going to help them draw closer to God to let loose with a homophobic nastygram.

The problem (for me) in the anti-gay-bashing/bullying crusade is that bullying is wrong, period. Whether a kid is getting picked on for being the "wrong" race or the "wrong" size or the "wrong" orientation, teasing and bullying is wrong.

You can be against bullying without approving of the aspect of a person getting picked on. Thus, people like me are in a box, wanting to encourage kids and not have them teased into depression and often suicide, but also not wanting to encourage improper behavior in the process.

 

Defusing an F-bomb

Here's an interesting piece from ESPN's TrueHoop blog where Joakim Noah was discussing letting loose with a word rhyming with maggot towards an abusive fan over the weekend. Kobe's pocket was lightened earlier this season when he unleashed a dual f-bomb (the classic one followed by the maggot one) at a referee after a bad call.

Arnovitz: How homophobic is an NBA locker room?

Noah: Not at all.

Arnovitz: But f----- is tossed around without people even thinking about it?

Noah: Exactly. But a lot less than you probably think.

I don't know what locker rooms of the 2010s are like, but the playgrounds of the early 1970s had the maggot-rhymer used as an all-purpose put-down. Back then, we'd be more aware of homophones in English class than homophobia; such people in real-life were a distant theory as far as I knew. The pejorative was oft saved for people either on the un-macho side or just for someone you didn't like.

Thus, Noah may well be right; people use that term without cross-referencing homosexuality, just like a classic f-bomb may have nothing to do with sexual activity in the mind of the speaker.

That being said, it comes from a British term for a cigarette butt. A little more appetizing than a maggot, but not much. People might taught about someone welshing and gypping them without thinking that they are insulting southwestern British and Roma respectively.

Best not to insult at all. Easier said than done.

Preventing Crazies

Toning down the political rhetoric is the issue of the day, but popular conservatives don't seem to be the problem here. Our shooter wasn't saying anything about Beck or Palin or Rush or any of the usual suspects of the right.Rock and rap have nihilistic wings that seemed to have been more an inspiration than any media talker, but there aren't political points to be made by bashing them.

Demonizing your foes is not cool, given that the foe isn't usually the Devil himself. However, that isn't the problem; most murders of this type are done by people who aren't emotionally playing with a full deck and need help.

I'm not sure if the tone of our political discussions are going to change the number of attacks on public officials. Oklahoma City is about the only major piece of political terrorism that was right of center. Most everything else was either crazed (both shots at Ford, Reagan and Tuscon) or of the left (both Kennedies and Truman) with only King's assassination being a "right-wing" thing if you can chalk up racism as a conservative thing.

It doesn't seem that our shooter in Tuscon was coherently conservative; he seemed of the left more than of the right but with an anarchic, nihilistic streak that was more psychotic than political. The solution there would be to do more to get edgy folks into psych treatment sooner, but civil liberties issues crop up there, as it's hard to deem folks to be a danger to others before they actually act out on their thoughts.

Such aggressive treatment of violent-leaning personalities would require spending more resources on mental health and making the laws in that area less libertarian so to make it easier to force marginal folks into treatment. That will tick off both sides of the aisle, as it spends more money and makes the ACLU types nervous.

Out of The Closet and Into the Barracks

After losing one on taxes, the left got its day in the sun, with a 65-31 center-left win on a repeal of "don't ask, don't tell." That may well be where the consensus of the American public is. It's been just shy of a generation since the policy got put in place early in the Clinton administration, and we've had two decades of seeing homosexuality normalized in American culture, at least on the level of not discriminating against gay folks in the workplace.

The public isn't there yet on normalizing same-sex marriage, but this seems to be an extension of general thoughts on living-and-let-live on personal matters; acceptance short of a full embrace of moral equivalence. The typical recruit who was in diapers when DADT was passed in 1993 would be more attunded to working in such a setting that some older-fogie like me who grew up in a less-tolerant era. The current era is a bit less moral but also takes away a lot of the gay-bashing that was part and parcel of culture in years past, so such civility-level tolerance is not exactly a step in the wrong direction.

Here's some interesting politics; the list of the eight Republicans aye votes-

The Democrats have sought Republican support for overturning the ban, and eight of them voted for a repeal including: Sens. Scott Brown of Massachusetts, Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mark Kirk of Illinois, Richard Burr of North Carolina, John Ensign of Nevada and George Voinovich of Ohio.

Not too many surprises there, Most of those on the list are on the moderate side with the exception of Burr and Ensign. Ensign looks more and more like a lame duck; between this vote and his mistress problems, he is all but insured of getting a primary challange in 2012 and would likely be an underdog to win a primary.

Burr pitched a shutout on his ACU in 2009; 2010's probably going to be blemished by this one.

New York Abstains... out of Necessity

We've seen a few studies plug the benefits of modest alcohol consumption; the anti-oxidants in wine are one possible explanation. However, a study in an alcoholism journal found that heavy drinkers did better than non drinkers-

But even after controlling for nearly all imaginable variables — socioeconomic status, level of physical activity, number of close friends, quality of social support and so on — the researchers (a six-member team led by psychologist Charles Holahan of the University of Texas at Austin) found that over a 20-year period, mortality rates were highest for those who had never been drinkers, second-highest for heavy drinkers and lowest for moderate drinkers.

The study proper is behind a pay wall, so I don't know exactly what the control factors are. However, there is one breakdown that isn't mentioned, the fact that we can divide non-drinkers into two categories.

One is people who choose not to drink for social or religious reasons and the other is people who can't drink because of a medical condition. For instance, someone with juvenile-onset diabetes shouldn't have alcohol and may have never gotten around to developing a drinking habit. Or, people who are on antidepressants might be forced away from booze and may have done so from teen years on.

That second grouping of forced abstainers might be a bigger health risk and die sooner. If those people were factored out of the mix, then we'd have a clearer look at what non-drinking does.

A Country Lefty Can Survive

Here's some interesting politics up north; the Conservative government is looking at getting rid of a long-gun registry plan and may have the help of rural NDP MPs to put them over the top. The Liberals are against the plan and will envoke a party line on the issue, but there is enough of a city-rural split in the NDP camp to have it be a free vote for the NDP; that appears to be enough to see the bill passed.

On both sides of the 49th there are a lot of blue-collar hunters, especially as you get out into rural areas. Willie Nelson comes to mind as a guy who'd vote NDP if we had Canadian parties come south, but he's also the kind of guy who might know his way around a duck blind. Michael Moore is another NDP guy if Michigan became the 11th province and he's an NRA member.

The urban lefties might not like it, but rifles and shotguns mean different things outside of Toronto and Vancouver.

Minus 3

That's what Google tells you when you enter in 9-12.

I'm not a Glenn Beck watcher, so I was unaware until today that 9-12 was not just the day after 9-11 and the patriotism that flows from that, but a theo-libertarian creed with 9 principles and 12 values. The 12 values aren't at issue, but he, like Google suggests, is minus three in the principles, at least from a Biblical perspective.

#1- America is Good.

God is good. America is a nice country and one I am happy to be in, but phrasing it that way is essentially deifying the US.

I understand that Beck is probably recoiling from the liberal habit of assuming the US is always wrong and that the other guy is right, but knee-jerk jingoism isn't the answer to knee-jerk American-establishment-bashing.

#7 I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.

Yes they can. It's called taxes. How much they can and should take is open to debate, but government from the time of Saul and David forward collected taxes. Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's, I think the line goes.

#9 The government works for me. I do not answer to them, they answer to me.

They answer to the people, not Glenn Beck. If you are king, the government works for you. If you are a citizen, you have a say in how it is run. Collectively, the government answers to the public, but the individual often has duties as citizens as well where they respond to proper government authority. The alternative is anarchy.

It's a libertarian mindset where the power rests in the person. God may be the center, but He takes a back seat to the family and the individual the rest of the way.

There are shades of Anglo-Israelism, where the Anglosphere and the US in particular has taken the place of Israel in the big picture; that runs alongside Beck's Mormon theology that is more US-centric than orthodox Christianity is.

Seperated by a Common Language

This piece on a British pun contest was interesting. Few of the puns were all that good, and quite a few of them weren't even puns per se but one-liners.

The joke about stealing an anti-bullying wristband from "a short, fat ginger kid" isn't a pun at all. It also didn't make sense to an American, since I had to go Googling to find that ginger is one of those Cockney rhyming slang things, like where we get the Bronx Cheer synonym raspberry from raspberry tart rhyming with fart. Ginger flows from ginger beer which rhymes with agaybasherwewillnotusehere.

Also, stone for 16 pounds is an Englishism that is not in the typical American vocabulary. So describing a pair of anorexic ladies as "two birds, one stone" is not PC to say the least but is a fighting shot at good pun. A jab at Vanessa Feltz, an obscure (from this side of the pond) BBC announcer, isn't going to translate well, nor did writing a number on a wooden spoon and walking into a pub; the later must be part of pub culture that I am clueless of.

Arab Christian Slasher?

Flint rarely gets in the news for good things, save the occasional sports star; Flint could contend for a basketball Olympic medal if it were a city-state. However, the news that was coming out of Flint the last few days was of a serial killer who liked knives and offing mostly blacks.

There is now a suspect under arrest, an Israeli Arab named Elias Abuelazam, who had a green card and was working in metro Flint. That first name might lean toward him having nominally Christan roots; there are quite a few Christian Palestinians (most Israeli Arabs are of Palestinian descent, just on the "wrong" side of the border) including Yassir's widow. Such Palestinian Christians wouldn't be uncommon in Michigan; metro Detroit has a large number and I remember my Saginaw Valley State Intervarsity Christian Fellowship group had a Palestinian guy in it.

This might lead to Arab-bashing in general, especially aimed at a large cadre of Arab-American shopkeepers like the slasher's boss in Mt. Morris. It will also lead to some Muslim-bashing, even though Abuelazam might not have been Muslim.

Candygram for Big Oil! Candygram for Big Oil!?

Here's an interesting story from out of Houston, where an oil exploration company president's wife was the victim of a pipe bomb put in what was suspected to look like a box of chocolates. [Insert Forrest Gump joke]. [Insert Candygram for Mongo joke].  Thankfully, she survived.

Also, insert Glen Beck going over-the-top joke. Yes, there may well have been some ecoterrorists at play, but I don't think they'd be trolling low enough in the food chain to pick out Adams Resources Exploration as a target. They are publicly traded and have a market cap of $82 million as we go to press, but that's small potatoes compared to the megacorps that get all the publicity. 

What might be as likely is that someone had it in for Adams president James Brock Moore III. Unless the attacker had been doing some serious digging in the oil industry literature, Moore doesn't seem to be a likely target for some ecoterrorist. If I were the police, I'd be more inclined to be looking at mundane leads, like someone who had a beef with him or his wife.

Rickrolled at Birth?

Here's an interesting observation. I've been catching up on the Pistons now that I'm up at my folks for Christmas. The surprise of the roster this year, other than losing three members of the rotation to injury, has been second-rounder Jonas Jerebko, who has played a very solid small forward in Tayshawn Prince's absence.

I don't know if anyone's caught this, but Jonas looks like a dead ringer for Rick Astley of RickRoll infamy.

Tayshawn's bad back is scary; it reminds me of Brad Daugherty's back problems in the early 90s, where he spent two seasons almost being ready to get back on the court.

Mio in Da Moonlight

I'm still recovering from a baaad case of bronchitis that has had me down for the count for over the week; two doc-in-a-box visits and a Sunday visit to the ER later, and I'm starting to recover from the crud I came down with on Halloween night. I'm slated to come off the IR on Thursday if all goes well.

I was thumbing through a Meijer flier for this week and I was reminded of the high holy day coming up in Michigan; November 15. That's the start of firearm deer hunting season, where lots of folks head north for a bit of hunting and a lot of male bonding. It's a non-trivial part of Michigan folk culture, such that seeing Flint-centric Michael Moore as an NRA member isn't shocking; a blue-collar UAW guy is more likely to be a hunter than a Brady Campaign backer.

They had a corner of this week's page three as "Deer Camp Must Haves": Mayo, pancakes, jerky (Sasquatch to tease sold separately) and peanuts. They left off the beer, however. They also may have forgotten that the rest of their domain might not be on the same schedule; that's a bit of a headscratcher for a Kentuckian who doesn't know Meijer's Michigan base.

At least it falls on a Sunday so absenteeism won't be as bad... at work; expect to see a lot of pickups heading north on I-75 Friday night packing hunting gear. However, there will be a lot of churches that will be short quite a few of their menfolk this Sunday.

Elmo's a Girl!

Here's an interesting piece on the young lady, Jessica Miller, who plays Elmo in the touring Sesame Street Live, which is hitting Rupp Arena this weekend. She doesn't get to talk, since they use pre-recorded voices they lip-synch to on stage and are supposed to be mute when they're off-stage but in costume-

But even in personal meet-and-greets, the kids don't seem to mind an uncharacteristically silent Elmo. Miller said they never seemed to question when they are told that Elmo is resting his voice in preparation for the big show.

However, her cheerleading background might come in handy, as Elmo loves to bounce, as anyone who has dealt with a Tickle Me Elmo knows.

She might need to be careful about not going to the bathroom while in character. One of my female church friends from Akron used to do Barney for kid's parties. When she went into the woman's room in costume, a crushed young boy exclaimed "Barney's a GIRL!"

Purell Paranoia

Here's an interesting poll from the Great White North-33% of our northern neighbors won't shake hands due to fear of H1N1. I'm sure that you'd get a similar result if you polled Americans.

I remember having a bit of a cough last week, probably just allergies during a colder-than-normal October for Lexington. The student sitting next to my workstation in the classroom (we have a computer and projector at our disposal in each room) was packing Purell and made sure to re-wash his hands after I used some paper on his desk as a prop in my lecture.

Another casualty, at least at the Lexington Clinic branch we went to for Eileen's sinus infection last week, is waiting-room magazines; they've taken them out in order to stop spreading germs via the magazines and have posted notice for patients to BYORM in the future. Thankfully, I brought the local fish wrap newspaper with me.

It doesn't seem to be just Lexington where this is happening. I Googled for "waiting rooms magazines H1N1" and got this CBC piece noting that the same thing is happening in Manitoba and that the Canadian analog to the CDC recommended such a move back in August.

Closer to home, we have Owensboro hospitals doing the same thing as well as Lafayette, IN.

So much for Byron's Law of Waiting Rooms; the quality of reading material is inversely proportional to the length of wait. If they have great magazines, you'll get called in halfway into the first article, but if the best bet is a three-year-old Reader's Digest, you need to get out your overnight gear.

Hogs and Sweathogs

I was thumbing through the news and saw that a third person had died as a result of an extended stay in a dry sauna-like sweathouse in Sedona, AZ. The third victim had "multiple organ failure." It seems like there was one organ that seems to have surely failed in all this, and it was the brain of the organizer.

Eileen and I visited Sedona a few years ago when we were visiting her sister's clan in metro Phoenix over Thanksgiving, spending Black Friday morning touring north of town. The red rocks in the area are pretty, but the town was downright spooky with its New Ageyness. We didn't stay long, for there was an oppresive spirit to the town.

People are often looking for the mystical and supernatural without having a personal God tied to it. When you try that on your own, you get some very bad juju, like Mr. Legion in Mark 5; we were studying that our home group just now. I don't know that the guy here was messing with the supernatural, but the supernatural was sure messin' with him. 

After we saw the first recorded case of sooo-eee-cide, doing a number on the Gerasenes Futures Exchange's December pork belly contract (at least the folks who were short could really claim a act of God), Jesus instructed the former demoniac to "Go home to your family and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you."

Well, the Peanut Gallery is family, so I ned to be talking about Him more than I have.

The Liberal Art of Bumper Stickers

We were out TV-shopping today, bagging a 22" digital TV; it's odd to be lugging a TV in one hand and four two-liters of pop in the other and have the TV be lighter.

However, it was a car in front of me as we were heading to HH Gregg that got me thinking. It had about ten bumper stickers on the back, one supporting a funky music store downtown, a couple promoting bicycling, a couple promoting native American stuff, one proclaiming "I'm already against the next war" and one on the bottom right which just said "Liberal"; gosh, I think I figured that out already.

I'm not sure if there is any scientific way to quantify this, but it seems like a liberal activist's car is more likely to be stickered-up than a conservative or libertarian one. It may be that there are a wider array of causes that get a liberal juiced than conservative do. Or, since I'm living in a college town, I see more folks on the port side of the aisle.

CCM: Missing a Few Face Cards

I boo-booed; the Michael Card concert is next week. We got a nice drive on a warm early-fall evening and a stop at Dairy Queen from our abortive trip.

One thing that struck me is that the CCM scene I remember from the late 80s was much more diverse than it is today. I don't recall Card getting any airplay to speak of since his Joy in the Journey greatest-hits album in 1994. It might be that Card doesn't play the CCM game; his Wikipedia states that "He has at times distanced himself from the CCM industry by criticizing the promotion of personalities over musical content and the shifting emphasis away from God in order to sell more albums."

The music played on most Christian channels, K-LOVE in particular, tend to be less diverse and less theological than it was twenty years ago. I don't recall hearing Nicole C. Mullen for most of the 00s, but she has been active recording in a more "urban contemporary" vein that might not get heard on K-LOVE and its clones. Other than Mandisa, I can't think of a black artist that gets regular airplay, but back in the late 80s, you saw the Winans (both BeBe and CeCe and the Winans gospel act), Larnell Harris and Earth, Wind and Fire falsetto Phillip Bailey (who put out two good CCM albums in the late 80s while EWF was on hiatus) get regular airplay.

It might be that the Christian music universe has grown larger and has room to splinter; even K-LOVE does a slightly rockier Air One channel aimed at a pre-boomer crowd. Cities with a large black population will have a seperate black-flavored channel and Christian radio will often have a edgy channel, a K-LOVE clone and an old-school channel. Sometimes the old-schooller will be really old-school and play white southern Gospel but others will play classic CCM that the K-LOVEs have ignored.

Coming back from shopping the other day, said old-school Lexington station played Steve Camp's Whatever You Ask. Circa 1987 per this page. Maybe I'm an oldtimer, less than two years removed from being AARP eligable, but I miss a lot of '80s stuff and the ecclective nature of early CCM that had room for Twila Paris and Petra and the Winans.